We have been using the NOTECARDs for about 4 months in production now and have noticed that the Host Firmware update seems to work very well… rare to see an issue BUT the Notecard Firmware update errors at least 30% of the time. So to perform a Notecard firmware update we have to send the update and have it fail and repeat this process many times .. eventually it succeeds for most Notecards but for some it fails even after more than 6 attempts. Can you look at our account and see all the failures on update and figure out why they all fail with this error?
Hi @DanHarding,
Thanks for reporting this. On which Notecard type(s) are you seeing this errors? I’m wondering if there is any consistency across the device type (e.g. Cellular works ok but you’re seeing problems on Cell+WiFi) or even across specific SKUs (e.g. NOTE-WBGLW works fine, but NOTE-NBNA doesn’t).
Thanks,
Rob
We only use the NOTE-NBGLN on cellular
So just attempted again with OTA Notecard firmware updating … it fails quickly without even downloading the new image… how is this possible? Does it refuse to load a lower version number??
OK, so I now realize the the download of the image only occurred ONCE… and it had an Md5 error.. after that when I tell it to try again it appears to be looking at the corrupted image it already downloaded and failing again over and over….so how do I clear out the corrupted image so I can force it to download again versus only looking at it’s local corrupted image and failing the update process?
Ok, I tried another hack which is to send another firmware image (developer) to force it to download and it did… but even with the new image is still came up with an Md5 error
So the hack worked…. after changing to the developer release which failed IT did remove the md5 failed LTS8 image… so when I told it to update again it did download the image again and this time it was successful in updating it.
So I think the thing we would be looking for is in the case of an Md5 error when the device is 5 countries away… how do we remotely tell it that the image it downloaded is corrupted so it needs to download again? I assume it checks locally to save on cellular usage which makes sense BUT when the image is corrupted I don’t see a way to force a download except to change images to something else and then move back to the image you really want. Rob I look forward to reading your knowledgeable advice regarding this issue.
Hi @DanHarding,
The team has been looking into this series of errors closely today. It does turn out that with MD5 errors on Notecard firmware downloads, the firmware does NOT get re-downloaded after new firmware update requests (hence the issues you’re seeing make sense, though this is certainly a bug). There is a fix coming in a future release. In the meantime, your temporary solution of switching to a different version and then back to the original is a feasible remote option. Sorry about the issue!
Thanks,
Rob
I saw this failure just now, trying to update to the latest developer release:
Requested version: 9.3.1.17434
Current version: 9.1.1.17181
Error: pre-restart MD5 validation error {dfu-pre-md5}
Host firmware was running and making requests to notecard (attempting to sync and monitoring connection status), for which many requests timed out with no response from Notecard.
I retried, with the host inactive, and the update succeeded.